I signed The Euston Manifesto because I agreed with it. But I agreed with it because I am Old [-fashioned] Left. I agreed with it because I support its implicit call to reject the moral idiocy of the New Left, with its obfuscations and equivocations, its temporising on the new fascism represented by Islamic fundamentalists, its descent into reflexive and instinctual anti-Americanism, its refusal to treat honestly with the ghosts of its scores and scores of millions dead.
In his great essay Why I Write, George Orwell spoke about the ‘power of facing’: he realised, early in his life, that he had a power of facing unpleasant facts. It’s an unusual construction, and an unusual capacity. It connotes an ability to stare straight at something, and see what it really is. That sounds simple, but in an ideological age like ours is, it’s actually very difficult.
Today’s Left has lost this facility, if it ever possessed it. It sees unpleasant facts, yes (if pushed), but it stares straight past them: it doesn’t face them. It refuses to deal with them, to confront them, whilst at the same time positioning itself so as to deny that it actually ignores them. Its eternal moral alibi is ‘Yes, but…’. So we need The Euston Manifesto to re-confirm the Left’s moral base.
And — yet. Despite my admiration for the Manifesto and the intentions of its authors, I have some doubts. They seek to re-state the original purposes of the Left, its grand dream, derived from three hundred years of liberal tradition, and to re-constitute a New new Left, based on those undying principles.
But suppose there is no longer a need, or room for the Left — any Left, even theirs? Perhaps the age of the grand dream is over. Perhaps capitalism, all unwitting, has done most of the work for them.
Mr Freen over at Evil Pundit’s has attacked the Manifesto from the Right (most criticisms I’ve seen have come from an aggrieved or aggravated Left). He makes the point, undeniably true, that the Manifesto is still socialist. It is utopian, and implicit in its program is the expectation that governments could, and should, try to make the world a better place, under-write its freedoms, not least in their corner of it, by executive fiat. If I understand him right, Mr Freen is arguing for a deeper freedom: he is saying, in effect: Government — get out of my face. Leave us alone; we can work things out for ourselves. All your dreams have turned out to be wet ones.
Maybe that’s true, and maybe the Manifesto is behind the true curve of the times, an exercise in nostalgia, an ache for an age that’s past. An elegy.
Despite that, or maybe because of it, I’m glad I signed it.
Update: Wise and useful words here from Norm Geras, one of the Manifesto’s founders, explaining the (deliberate) tension between the socialist and non-socialist elements of the Manifesto. Yet Socialism in an Age of Waiting, to whom he is responding, makes some powerful points, too. Many signatories, it seems, harbour reservations to one extent or another, as I do. But that in no way detracts from the force or necessity of the enterprise.
Further update: The controversy continues apace. Daniel Finklestein in The Times (yes, what a robotoid Mudochite he must be) remarks: a group of left-wing pundits and intellectuals wants to save the Left from itself — but why bother? It’s as hard to agree with that as it is to disagree. Still, this is the debate, and this is the time. This needed to happen.
